.png)
I’m writing this somewhere over the Atlantic.
In a couple of days, I’ll walk onto a TEDx stage in Germany and talk about Half Nester™.
That sentence still feels strange.
Not because I don’t believe in the idea.
Because when I first started putting words around this season of my life, I wasn’t thinking about stages.
I was trying to understand myself.
My kids were growing up. My role at the practice was changing. My parents needed me differently. My body was changing. My marriage was entering a different rhythm. And underneath all of it was this feeling that my life was still incredibly full, but I was changing inside it.
I didn’t think I needed a reinvention.
I needed language.
Something that could explain why I could feel grateful and unsettled at the same time.
Why I could love the life I had built and still wonder what was next.
Why a season that looked so successful from the outside could feel so unfamiliar from the inside.
So I started writing.
Then I started talking about it.
And then something happened that I didn’t expect.
Other women started saying, “Me too.”
The first six women
When I built the first Half Nester™ course, I asked six women to go through it with me.
Their lives were different.
Different marriages. Different careers. Different ages of kids. Different pressures. Different versions of what this middle season looked like.
But I kept hearing the same thing.
“I didn’t know how to explain this.”
“I thought it was just me.”
“I didn’t realize this was a season.”
That was the part that got me.
Not that they liked the course.
That they recognized themselves in the language.
There is something powerful about finally having words for something you’ve been feeling for a long time.
Once you can name it, you stop treating every uncomfortable feeling like proof that something has gone wrong.
You can say, “Oh. This is what I’m in.”
And somehow that creates a little space to breathe.
But I also knew those first six women knew me.
Some already trusted me.
People who care about you can be incredibly generous.
So a part of me still wondered:
Does this idea work outside my own circle?
Then strangers started saying yes
Around the same time, I was applying to TEDx events.
That process was its own lesson in patience.
Applications.
Interviews.
Rewrites.
Waiting.
More rewriting.
And a lot of working on an idea without any guarantee that anyone was going to choose it.
For most of my life, I’ve liked knowing the work is going somewhere.
Study hard, get the grade.
Build the practice, grow the business.
Train for the race, cross the finish line.
This was different.
I kept working because I believed the idea mattered, even when I had very little evidence that anything was going to happen with it.
Then people who didn’t know me started saying yes.
Germany.
Another invitation from Toronto that I ultimately couldn’t accept because of the timing.
Then Houston.
Different people. Different places. Different audiences.
None of them had known me for twenty years.
They didn’t know my kids.
They hadn’t been my patients.
They didn’t owe me a kind answer.
They only knew the idea.
And they kept saying yes to it.
That’s the part I’ve been thinking about on this plane.
Maybe the thing you need is the thing worth sharing
I think a lot of us assume that if something comes from a deeply personal place, it’s too specific to matter to anyone else.
We think it needs to be more polished.
More researched.
More universal.
More impressive.
But maybe sometimes the opposite is true.
Maybe the reason something connects is because it started somewhere honest.
I didn’t create Half Nester™ because I had studied this season from a distance.
I created it because I was living it.
I needed the words too.
And I think that matters.
Because when you’re willing to tell the truth about what you’re experiencing, someone else gets permission to recognize herself in it.
That doesn’t mean every personal story needs to become a business or a book or a TEDx talk.
That isn’t the point.
The point is that sometimes the thing you’re trying to understand for yourself contains something other people have been trying to understand too.
And you won’t know until you let it leave your own head.
This part is uncomfortable for me
I wish I could tell you I’m sitting here feeling completely confident about Saturday.
I’m not. 😂
I’ve worked hard on this talk.
I’ve spent the last few weeks training with Heroic Public Speaking, learning how different it is to write something on a page and actually make it live in a room.
I’m practicing.
I’m learning.
I’m getting more comfortable.
And I’m still nervous.
Because there is a difference between talking about something with six women who know you and standing on a stage in another country and saying:
This matters.
Listen.
That feels vulnerable to me.
Maybe because I’ve spent most of my life being more comfortable being useful than visible.
Dentistry made sense to me.
There was a patient.
There was a problem.
There was something I could do.
This is different.
I can’t fix this season for anyone.
I can only name it.
And maybe that’s enough.
I think that’s what has changed for me
A year ago, I was trying to understand what was happening in my own life.
Now there’s a course.
There’s a community.
There’s a book coming.
And on Saturday, there’s a stage in Germany.
I couldn’t have mapped that out if I tried.
And maybe I’m glad I couldn’t.
Because if I had needed to know exactly where this was going before I started, I might never have started.
I’m learning that clarity doesn’t always arrive first.
Sometimes curiosity does.
Sometimes you follow the thing that keeps pulling at you.
You share it with a few people.
You listen.
You make it better.
You keep going.
And eventually, you look up and realize the thing you created because you needed it has started belonging to other people too.
So maybe this is the question
What are you experiencing right now that you keep assuming is only yours?
What have you learned the hard way that someone else might need language for?
What keeps coming back around, even though you don’t yet know what you’re supposed to do with it?
You don’t have to turn it into anything.
You don’t need the five-year plan.
You don’t even need to know where it leads.
But maybe you can stop dismissing it just because it started with you.
Sometimes the most personal thing is also the most universal.
Sometimes “I needed this” is exactly where something meaningful begins.
And sometimes the thing you thought you were making for yourself was never going to stay yours.
I’ll know more after Saturday.
But I wanted to write this now, while I’m still on the way there.
While I’m still in the before.
With gratitude,
Valerie